Digital taxation: no sector tax for the digital sector
Paris, September 10, 2013 -The representatives of the digital industry note with satisfaction the opinion of the National Digital Council (CNNum) on digital taxation officially presented to the Government today, which has taken into account their recommendations and the in-depth consultation work with professional organizations. The CNNum has just issued a well-documented opinion, which argues in favor of rejecting any new national or sector-specific tax. The digital industry believes that it would be paradoxical, to say the least, to introduce measures that would prevent the widest possible dissemination of digital equipment and services, and that would isolate France at a time of European harmonization.
Representatives of the digital industry consider that the tax on connected devices mentioned in the debates would be a sector-specific tax, since it would amount to taxing digital usage. They also point out that digital technology supports innovation in all sectors, not only industrial but also cultural, by enabling the development of new experiences and democratizing content. Logically, the tax on connected devices, recently proposed by the Lescure Report but strongly criticized by participants in the CNNum debates, should therefore be abandoned in future arbitrations.
More broadly, the content of the debates gathered in the CNNum report demonstrates the limits and counterproductive effects of each of the numerous tax proposals that have fuelled public debate in recent years, whether it be the tax on online advertising, the tax on the purchase of e-commerce services (TASCOé), the extension of the obsolete and opaque private copy levy system to Cloud Computing, the tax on bandwidth, or the tax on personal data. Discussions at the CNNum highlighted the fact that all these tax proposals threaten to penalize France’s most innovative players – in other words, the growth and jobs of today and tomorrow.
As representatives of the digital industry have always maintained, international tax harmonization must be seen as the best way to ensure that tomorrow’s national levies correspond more closely to the actual creation of wealth on national territories.
The representatives of the digital industry share the Council’s recommendation that France take its full share of leadership in the deployment of a European digital industrial strategy, by placing digital technology, innovation and entrepreneurship at the heart of European industrial policies. They support the proposal to make the next European Council a strategic meeting on this point.
The CNNum’s opinion should now be able to bring to a close a transparent debate, initiated by Minister Fleur Pellerin, which involved all the stakeholders concerned (parliamentarians, experts, manufacturers, civil society) and which concluded that any national and sectoral tax affecting the digital industry would be inappropriate and counter-productive. What’s more, the various debates highlighted the value-creation potential of digital technology, which France must integrate into its strategy of industrial ambition.
